Jeremy Parish
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NES Works 134: Strider
🕑 Added 2024-05-01 12:39:40 +0000 UTCHello and welcome to May ’24. Here is an episode about Strider. Well, partially. It's also about some legislative and cultural shifts in America and Japan during the first half of the 1980s that had knock-on effects on all media, including video games, and which explain (at least to some degree) what went wrong with this NES cart. Kind of. I don't quite present an airtight case of cause-and-effect, but it's worth examining things like the FTC's deregulatory era and the fallout of the Declaration a New Anime Century event in general, because they loom large in the background of the material I've been exploring all this time. I should have done this sooner, I guess, but it took the mess that was Strider to finally get my ass in gear.
I enjoy/enjoyed NES Strider for what it is/was worth, both now and back when it debuted, but even in 1989—back when I actually had to patience to slog through the Red Dragon and face down Matic—this game didn't sit right with me. So please forgive my lengthy lamentations. They come from a sincere place.
Comments
William Wend
The jumping in this game is atrocious. I was so frustrated by that and the stage confusion you mention too.
JJR
I still remember playing through this game on summer as a kid. The absolutely crazy thing to me is that I don't remember the frustration of the triangle jump- but I guess most of us had a far higher tolerance for jank back then. I do remember, momentarily, being disappointed because I loved the arcade game and hoped the NES game would covey some of the stylish wow-factor that bleeds through in the arcade game. Anyway, it's so close to being a classic. It really would be something to find out exactly why it wasn't worth it to Capcom to delay this a month or so and fix some it, but maybe they were already looking at the US rental market situation and figured this upped the difficulty level enough to warrant a US release.
Luke Lamothe
You’ve opened up old wounds Jeremy. 12 year old me is still waiting for that NES release of Black Tiger to come out...
Sven Mascarenhas
As always, my favourite story of Hasbro's marketing is when they were told they couldn't advertise GI Joe toys during GI Joe itself... so they just sold the shows as a Joe / TF block, and advertised Joe toys on TF and TF toys on Joe. Geniuses... that's how you sell enough toys that every boy in North America owned, on average, three figures.
